Way Station

by Clifford D. Simak

called up. That we exist only for one purpose, to come and

talk with you, to fill in for the real people that ...

She had said that they must face up to the kind of things they were. And what were they? Not, what did he think they were, but what were they, actually? What did they think themselves to be? For perhaps they knew much better than did he.

He had dabbled in a thing which he had not understood. And had, furthermore, committed that greater sin of thinking that he did understand. And the fact of the matter was that he had just barely understood enough to make the concept work, but had not understood enough to be aware of its consequences. With creation went responsibility and he was not equipped to assume more than the moral responsibility for the wrong that he had done, and moral responsibility, unless it might be coupled with the ability to bring about some mitigation, was an entirely useless thing.

first they’d come only when he’d called them up, using the knowledge and the techniques that he had acquired in his study of the work done by the thaumaturgists of Alphard XXII.

had seen much of pure visual horror as portrayed in alien bodies. And yet he had learned to submerge that sense of horror, to disregard the outward appearance of it, to regard all life as brother life, to meet all things as people.

She turned me blind—she

Is Lucy an alien?

He stood beside the porch and watched them down the

hill, wondering how a girl so fine as Lucy could spring from such decadent stock.

He saw that it was the pyramid of spheres and now all the spheres were spinning slowly, in alternating clockwise and counterclockwise motions, and that as they spun they shone and glittered, each in its own particular color, as if there might be, deep inside each one of them, a source of soft, warm light.

This talk of abandoning Earth station was wrong, too. It made no sort of sense. For abandoning of the station would not wreck the project. Although, more than likely, it would wreck whatever hope he’d held for the human race.

The aim is to wreck the project, to free the time and effort that is expended here for some other project. If they can force us to abandon one station, then we stand discredited. Then all our motives and our judgment come up for review.”

“You sound,” said Enoch, “as if you have little hope of maintaining this station, here on Earth.” “Almost no hope at all,” Ulysses told him. “But so far as you yourself are concerned, there will be an option. You can stay here and live out an ordinary life on Earth or you can be assigned to another station. Galactic Central hopes that you would elect to continue on with us.”

is most unlike you. Almost as if there were two races.” “There is not two races. There is only one.”